Commentary on life with a southern accent

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Sarah's story about what her dad did for her recently made me laugh, and it reminded me of something my dad did for me when I was in my tweens. He took me not only to a Shaun Cassidy concert at the Charlotte Coliseum, but to an Andy Gibb concert at Carowinds. The seating was general admission so we had to wait in line for hours at the Paladium gate to be sure to get seats. I remember it was summertime and really hot. I am sure that standing in line with a bunch of preteen girls was not his idea of a fun day, but he didn't complain once.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Since
our last statement on "Shock Troops," a Diarist by Private Scott Thomas
Beauchamp that we published in our July 23 issue, we have continued our
investigation into the article's veracity. On Wednesday, for a brief
period, The Drudge Report posted several documents from the Army's own
investigation into Beauchamp's claims. Among those documents was a
transcript of a phone conversation that TNR Editor Franklin Foer and
TNR Executive Editor J. Peter Scoblic had with Beauchamp on September
6--the first time the Army had granted TNR permission to speak with
Beauchamp since it cut off outside contact with him on July 26. During
this conversation, Beauchamp refused to discuss his article at all:
"I'm not going to talk to anyone about anything," he said. In light of
that phone call, some have asked why The New Republic has not retracted
"Shock Troops."

The answer is simple: Since this controversy began, The New
Republic's sole objective has been to uncover the truth. As Scoblic
said during the September 6 conversation: "[A]ll we want out of this,
and the only way that it is going to end, is if we have the truth. And
if it's--if it's certain parts of the story are bullshit, then we'll
end that way. If it's proven to be true, it will end that way. But it's
only going to end with the truth." The September 6 exchange was
extremely frustrating; however, it was frustrating precisely because it
did not add any new information to our investigation. Beauchamp's
refusal to defend himself certainly raised serious doubts. That said,
Beauchamp's words were being monitored: His squad leader was in the
room as he spoke to us, as was a public affairs specialist, and it is
now clear that the Army was recording the conversation for its files.

The next day, via his wife, we learned that Beauchamp did want to
stand by his stories and wanted to communicate with us again.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, Beauchamp telephoned Foer at home and, in
an unmonitored conversation, told him that he continued to stand by
every aspect of his story, except for the one inaccuracy he had
previously admitted. He also told Foer that in the September 6 call he
had spoken under duress, with the implicit threat that he would lose
all the freedoms and privileges that his commanding officer had
recently restored if he discussed the story with us.

Go
on to read about how everything wrong with this story is the fault of
the Army and right wing bloggers. Gee, guys, I am convinced. Beauchamp
says the story is still good. Case closed. No consideration whatsoever
that so many things in the stories have been contradicted by facts.
Nope. Beauchamp says it is all good. Yeah, the soldier wearing a
child's skull under his helmet all day, soldiers mercilessly taunting a
disfigured woman in the chow hall, the Bradleys that can do manuevers
that those familiar with them say are not possible -- these all have to
be taken as fact until proven otherwise.

To
read the Thomas pieces was, simply, to doubt them. And to wonder if its
editors had ever actually met a soldier on his way to or from Iraq, or
talked to any human being involved in the modern military.

Unfortunately,
journalism does not have the luxury to operate in a courtroom, where
evidence is weighed and a jury decides the preponderance of proof over
months. Instead, if a story is of doubtful veracity, and can't be or
won't be supported in its entirety by the author, then the editors, for
the sake of the magazine and its other dutiful employees, must distance
themselves and apologize to the readers, and do so within a reasonable
amount of time.

They can point out that there are few or many errors, or that the
errors are or are not of a magnitude to impugn the entire story, but
these sorts of judgements must be made rather quickly once an author
does not supply the editors with supporting documentation or a
reasonable willingness to defend his own work.

Mr. Beauchamp may think most of his story was factual, and that only
a few tiny details were exaggerated to sex up the narrative's appeal,
but that is still not quite good enough. He either stands by its
entirety or confesses he can't; and if he can't (for whatever reason)
do the latter, then the editors must explain why they too won't--even
if that decision is embarrassing to themselves, delights their
adversaries, and causes enormous pain to Mr. Beauchamp's wife and
friends.

This is the stuff Bob Owens has been alluding to for a while now — somebody leaked the transcripts to Drudge and he is linking pdf versions.

THE NEW REPUBLIC has been standing behind the stories
from their Baghdad Diarist, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, since questions
were first raised about their accuracy over the summer. On August 10,
the editors at TNR accused the Army of “stonewalling” their
investigation into the stories by preventing them from speaking with
Beauchamp. The DRUDGE REPORT has since obtained the transcript of a
September 7 call between TNR editor Frank Foer, TNR executive editor
Peter Scoblic, and Private Beauchamp. During the call, Beauchamp
declines to stand by his stories, telling his editors that “I just want
it to end. I’m not going to talk to anyone about anything really.” The
editors respond that “we just can’t, in good conscience, continue to
defend the piece” without an explanation, but Beauchamp responds only
that he “doesn’t care what the public thinks.” The editors then ask
Beauchamp to cancel scheduled interviews with the WASHINGTON POST and
NEWSWEEK.

For those who have not followed the Scott Thomas Beauchamp “Shock Troops” story, Bob Owens has had the best coverage and just wrote the following on Monday:

Details will continue to trickle out revealing just how
deceptive the editorial staff at The New Republic has been to its
readership and critics alike, and once those details are made public, I
very much doubt that Franklin Foer, Peter Scoblic, and Jason Zengerle
will be able to survive the coming purge.

I hope Bob is right.

Update: I just finished reading the entire
transcript of the phone call Beauchamp had with the NR editors. Read it
all. It is incredible that they could do anything less than a full
retraction after that conversation with Beauchamp. Here is one rather
odd quote from the call where Foer relays a message from Beauchamp’s
wife.

Foer: “Ellie sent me an email to tell you that it’s
the most important thing in the world for her that you say that you
didn’t recant.”

Update II: Bob Owens has known about the phone call
and documents for quite a while now, but was not able to report them.
Read his most recent post HERE.

Update III:Michael Goldfarb, who was the first to seriously question the Shock Troops story, weighs in at Weekly Standard.

The documents posted by Drudge reveal that the New
Republic’s editors have known for several weeks that the central
anecdote of the story was untrue, that the other anecdotes were deeply
suspect, and that the author was no longer standing by his work. And
yet they remained publicly silent even though they had long ago
promised to be open and forthcoming on the matter. Worse still, they
asked Beauchamp to cancel pending interviews with the Washington Post
and Newsweek, lest their complicity in Beauchamp’s slanders come to
light.

Foer attacked his magazine’s critics as “reckless” and
“ideologically motivated,” at one point even demanding an apology from
the bloggers who did so much to advance this story and find out the
truth of the matter. He now has more than a little ’splaining to do.

Update IV: Drudge has taken down his links to the documents (I have heard due to server problems or something similar), but The Jawa Report has them posted, and also has a great post on the story.

Update V:Michelle Malkin
has an excellent post with extensive quotes from the documents and
reminds us that Shattered Glass will be playing twice on the Indendent
Film Channel Friday. The movie is excellent. It seems to me these
documents might just be enough material for a sequel.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

One might think that an 80-95% decrease in war related deaths in
Iraq would be a pretty darn big news. One thinking that would be wrong.
Today's media evidently doesn't think it is a huge deal. At least it is
being reported. It is just not being shouted with the fanfare reserved
for increases in violence in Iraq. As George Will put it recently in a "must read" column:

Mainstream
media types tend to think that, while rising casualties from Iraq are
legitimate news, falling casualties are not. But even so the word got
out: The surge strategy was producing results. Anbar province, given up
for lost in 2006, turned peaceful and cooperative in 2007. U.S.
casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties were down. Brookings scholars
Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, no fans of the administration's
conduct of the war, announced on July 30 (in the pages of The New York
Times, no less) that this was "a war we might just win."

..No
thinking person would look at last year's weather reports to judge
whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news.
The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad
news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery,
that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for
us to leave so they can crush their neighbors. This view allows our
soldiers two possible roles: either "victim caught in the crossfire" or
"referee between warring parties." Neither, rightly, is tolerable to
the American or British public.

Today I am in Iraq, back in a war of such strategic consequence
that it will affect generations yet unborn--whether or not they want it
to. Hiding under the covers will not work, because whether it is good
news or bad, whether it is true or untrue, once information is widely
circulated, it has such formidable inertia that public opinion seems
impervious to the corrective balm of simple and clear facts...I came to
Iraq in December 2004 specifically because friends in the military had
been telling me about the disconnect between the situation on the
ground and the media coverage about it. This is partly why I have
remained focused enough on this problem to write about it dozens of
times, beginning with an early dispatch about how many news reports
"from" Iraq are generated . Later I described the expensive and
exasperating embed process that makes long-term on-the-ground reporting
next to impossible for most small or medium media outlets, and just
plain impossible for most freelancers and independents...

Clearly, a majority of Americans believe the current set of outdated
fallacies passed around mainstream media like watered down drinks at
happy hour. Why wouldn't they? The cloned copy they get comes from the
same sources that list the specials at the local grocery store, and the
hours and locations of polling places for town elections. These same
news sources print obituaries and birth announcements, give
play-by-play for local high school sports, and chronicle all the
painful details of the latest celebrity to fall from grace.

Yon is putting his money where his mouth is and is offering his
dispatches free of charge. If you would like to see him continue to do
the reporting he is doing from Iraq, please consider sending some money his way.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

meant to link to Stop the ACLU's Video History of the ACLU Part VI about four days ago, but let it slip between the cracks. In fact, since I have had such a hard time finding the time to blog lately I have not linked to STACLU nearly as often as it deserves. I scrolled down the site to find the post linked above and had to go through quite a few pages of posts before I found it and it was only posted a few days ago. There is just a lot of good stuff there so when you have a minute go check it out.

I missed the debate this afternoon because I was working, but did see Chris Matthews on the Today show this morning being questioned about his comment regarding the criminality of this administration. It was just about the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. After seeing that I don't know whether or not I could have stood watching him moderate the debate anyway.

One more thing, since I am catching up here -- I owe Paul Hooson a post on the new television season, but for those just wanting a quick list of recommendations, here are a few: Journeyman on NBC is one of my favorites, along with Moonlight on CBS. I also like Chuck on NBC. I tried to watch Bionic Woman, but missed the first part and just couldn't get into it. The new season of Prison Break is just not nearly as good as the last couple, but the new season of Desperate Housewives is every bit as good. I especially like Bree's new competition in the homemaker department. The show I am most addicted to right now and do not miss (I actually DVR a couple of different showings of each episode just to be sure I don't miss them) is Damages (on FX) with Glenn Close and Ted Danson. That show just grabs you and doesn't let go. I have seen every episode and it just gets better and better and keeps you guessing all the way. I guess it is one of those mini-series type deals like Starter Wife was (which I also loved) so I assume that when it is over, it is over. If you have not been watching it I highly recommend watching the DVD when it comes out.

As for watching series that you might have missed, if you didn't see this season of The Closer, Saving Grace , Monk, Psych or The Dead Zone, catch them on the reruns. They were all really good -- especially The Closer. If you wonder how I can watch all this television, the answer is DVR. I DVR everything now and watch it late at night when the house is quiet and often watch them in the background when I am working on my computer. I would love to hear recommendations on the shows I have not seen. I have been meaning to catch the new Kelsey Grammar comedy, but haven't yet.

Monday, October 01, 2007

John Hawkins has posted results of the 2007 edition
of his poll of right-of-center bloggers' favorite people on the right.
Next week he will poll for the least favorite. It will be fun to see
how many people make both lists.